1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to communication systems; and, more particularly, to interleaving within such communication systems.
2. Description of Related Art
Data communication systems have been under continual development for many years. The primary goal within such communication systems is to transmit information successfully between devices. Unfortunately, many things can deleteriously affect signals transmitted within such systems resulting in degradation of or even complete failure of communication. Examples of adverse effects include interference and noise that may be caused by various sources including other communications, low-quality links, degraded or corrupted interfaces and connectors, etc.
Some communication systems use forward error correction (FEC) coding and/or error correction code (ECC) coding to increase the amount of information that may be transmitted between devices. When a signal incurs one or more errors during transmission, a receiver device can employ the FEC or ECC coding to try to correct those one or more errors. In addition, some communication systems use certain types of interleaving and/or deinterleaving to attempt to minimize the impact of a noise event on a transmission. There are a variety of types of interleaving and/or deinterleaving in prior art system yet there continues to be room for improvement to implement various forms of interleaving and/or deinterleaving.
A continual and primary directive in this area of development has been to try continually to lower the SNR required to achieve a given bit error ratio (BER) or symbol error ratio (SER) within a communication system. The Shannon limit is the theoretical bound for channel capacity for a given modulation and code rate. The ideal goal has been to try to reach Shannon's channel capacity limit in a communication channel. Shannon's limit may be viewed as being the data rate per unit of bandwidth (i.e., spectral efficiency) to be used in a communication channel, having a particular signal to noise ratio (SNR), where transmission through the communication channel with arbitrarily low BER or SER is achievable. There continues to be ample room for improvement in BER or SER performance including that which may be achieved with improved and better implementations of interleaving and/or deinterleaving